“Yes. And he had only been gone for a month or two. That was when I started taking my walks.” He slid his palms around to her backside, dragging leisurely stroking fingers over the swell of it while he talked. “I walked to Bow Street. I walked to Covent Garden. I walked to Cheapside and Camden and Canary Wharf. While I was walking, it was enough, but then, inevitably, I’d just end up home again with naught to do but make too much food or re-polish the bannister.”
“The bannister,” she echoed weakly.
“So I started to buy books. I learned which ones I liked. I read quite a lot of indulgent, brooding nonsense, Claire. I read the entirety of Lord Byron.”
That seemed to startle her enough to get her focus back up to his eyes. “Oh?” she said, clearly intrigued. “I have as well.”
“Then hear me when I say this,” Freddy told her, giving her bum a squeeze. “What you wrote here is so much better that I feel a comparison would only insult your skill.”
A sequence of things flashed over her face, a little flicker of her eyelids at the way he was touching her, an immediate instinct to argue, a flush of pleased understanding.
“Oh, well, then I suppose I shouldn’t make any of the changes I had planned,” she said evenly, batting her lashes at him. Shesqueezed her knees into his hips to steady herself, leaning over and carefully picking up the stack of pages, transferring them to the bedside table. “If you think it cannot be improved upon.”
He watched her, his breath suddenly caught in his chest, fascinated with a couple of clinging drops of water that still sat on the ends of her curls and beaded down the back of her neck. “I am not the expert,” he managed to say, his throat gone a little dry. “Perhaps if you explained the edits …”
“Oh, I suppose I could,” she said with a primness that made him immediately start to grin as she straightened back up, the dressing gown sagging over one of her shoulders. “In the scene you just read, for instance. Were you satisfied with the way things concluded?”
“Not remotely,” he confessed, unable to resist reaching up to touch the newly revealed skin and immediately getting slapped away, the sound of her reactive little swat echoing off his knuckles like he’d been an errant schoolboy reaching for candy that wasn’t his. It brought the simmering grin all the way out, splitting across his face in earnest.
“I see, I see,” she said, adjusting in his lap, wiggling deliberately this time in a way that made his vision blur back up. “It was that knock at the door that was the problem, hm?”
“One of them,” he managed to say, somehow.
“Oh, are there other problems?” she demurred. “You must tell me.”
He opened his mouth to begin a sentence, getting so far as speaking the single sound of the letterIinto the world and then failing anything else.
“Perhaps you wish they had embraced in more detail,” she speculated, “after the kissing. I suppose I could add a few more sentences to that.”
He nodded, his eyelids flickering as she adjusted again, smirking down at him with complete awareness of what she was doing, mimicking her earlier squirms.
“What if the pirate king”—she considered, taking his hand and holding it up in between them, grasped in her smaller ones—“touched her face?”
She pressed his palm into her cheek, considering it. “Hmm, not quite right, is it?”
“Claire,” he managed to get out, strangled as all hell.
“Yes, perhaps her throat,” she amended, dragging his fingers lower, gathering up all those delicious little beads of bathwater on the palm of his hand. “Still no?”
He could feel her heart absolutely thundering, the pulse point in her throat jumping against the pads of his fingers like it was striking a war drum. Perhaps shecouldbluff, he realized, marveling in horror at how composed she seemed. Perhaps she had been able to all along.
She pulled his hand lower, letting him feel the source of that pulse, the slamming of her heart against her chest, right between the swell of her perfect breasts, still hidden beneath the dressing gown.
“Ah, but that is wrong,” she said suddenly, and flung his hand away, making him practically whimper in protest.
She smiled at him, reaching to her waist and loosening the belt that held her dressing gown in place, letting it sink off bothshoulders, easing down over the swell of her bosom, just short of revealing those rosy nipples to him.
“You actually are killing me,” he told her desperately. “You actually are a murderer.”
“Yes, good,” she said, dropping the fabric the rest of the way and letting him look. Letting him ogle. She took his hand back up and slid it under the skirt of her robe, along the inside of her thigh. “I thought perhaps the pirate king should be more … direct.”
He watched in abject awe as she lifted her hips and positioned his hand the way she wanted it, sinking back down onto his fingers, taking them into her like they were always hers for purposes of pleasure.
They both gasped then; they both pulled in the same sharp air.
He didn’t remember doing it, leaning forward and wrapping that arm back around her waist, holding her still while he took advantage of where she’d put his hand, of what she was letting him do. He pressed his lips into the delicate detail of her collarbone, scraped his teeth against it as he found a pace for touching her this way, as he found a rhythm.
He throbbed beneath it all, rigid against her backside while he played with her, while he kissed his way lower down her body and caught one of those tempting little nipples between his lips.
